Within a home network, each user has multimedia tools available which allow the interactive manipulation or processing of audio, video, graphic data etc. A television device, with high-level multi-mode processing specificities (sound, visual, graphic etc.), can thus be connected to an information processing system (processor, network) and also can be coupled with a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant). The latter offers a data processing and display quality which is clearly superior (processor, memory) to that of the television device.
Such a home network, in particular when it uses the IP (Internet Protocol) standard, therefore allows multimedia information to be sent within the home. It is linked to the outside world (to the Internet) via a gateway, the purpose of which is to manage the transition between the internal network space and the Internet space by readdressing the IP frames from the outside to the inside and vice versa. The home network possibly has an access point allowing the connection of devices, for example PDAs, via a wireless link (or several wireless links).
A user can, through a local application and by means of the abovementioned devices, choose films, music or other types of files or information in a remote database.
Such a database can however turn out to be extremely complex. For example, video-on-demand currently includes several thousand films, which can be as much as 300 000 units. Several methods of navigation in the databases are commonly used to take into account this variety:                search a film by name;        search several films by genres and categories/sub-categories; this solution imposes navigation in a tree structure and is not always to the user's satisfaction, as it is always restricted to navigation by themes and sub-themes without necessarily mastering the organization of the classification of the films; thus, there is a risk, for example, that he will not find a film that he would class among action films, in this same category;        choose a film from a list; the system extracts a limited number of films (for example, the latest release, generally with a maximum of 100 films);        in more advanced systems, a set of films is proposed according to the profile of the user (this profile has previously been described by a reference file or constructed from the choices registered in the database).        
It would be advantageous to have available another solution which offers an attractive experience for the user. It may particularly be noted that most systems present films in text format or thumbnail image format (reduced image of the film poster). Yet, the thumbnail image only provides few elements with regard to understanding the film and the texts quickly become tiresome to read.
However, a system which is both attractive and effective generally requires considerable processing capabilities, since the database is large. Indeed, known techniques rely most frequently on sorting algorithms allowing the extraction of the desired data according to the criteria entered by users or derived from their profiles. Several finer selection steps are then necessary, repeating the sorting process using the information already obtained. Finally, as the users must restart searches with other criteria to refine or reorientate their approaches, the set of available data is generally sifted through several times before the user is satisfied.